Ross Gay's unusual work, consisting of 102 essayettes each featuring something "delightful", went onto my reading list at the end of 2019 (also its year of publication), when I first came across Maria Popova's review. At the beginning of 2021, I finally made a start.

It was the central idea -- of looking for the delights that happen along in our lives, and savouring them, and commemorating them -- that first captured my imagination, and heaven knows, the intervening period has put a premium on this activity. We have all been forced to be adjust our delight-radar, in accordance with our limited radiuses. We have had to hone the art of being open to delights from the everyday, from the past, from deep within ourselves.

And yet we can probably all acknowledge that we have found them. Not always, of course. Some days blackness sits on top of our delight-meter. But often. Mostly, even. The vast majority of last year's Purple Tern posts, in fact, were an attempt to capture the delights of the days just passed, and in my recent attempts to tidy up the blog's focus, I suppose I am losing out on that dimension (except when I break the rules, and focus on the delights of my birthday.

Gay's style is infectious, and I swear my sentences have grown longer since reading him... He revels in piling on clauses and parentheses and digressions; he has no fear of comma forests or sentence fragments. But this fluidity enables him both to drill down into as well as dance around each delight he focuses on.

Like the biblical manna, delights cannot be hoarded, he stresses. They need to be spotted and picked up daily, by someone working on the principle that there is "no scarcity of delight". And indeed, his delights are very varied.

They can be trivial: "a cup of coffee from a well-shaped cup"; a "flower growing out of the crack between the curb and the asphalt street"; "the utterly forgettable magic of the carrot"; the reminder that "it is sometimes delightful just to observe."

They can be warmly social: "In almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. Letting someone else go first... This caretaking is our default mode and it's always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise." (This thought reminds me of Danusha Lameris's lovely poem "Small Kindnesses".) This conception of sociability is underlined by an analogy with the forest, in which healthy trees support older, weaker ones by means of root communication: "Joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away." (And this reminds me of the article I read recently about the leafless kauri stump kept alive by its forest neighbours.) Given that we are so connected, it is not surprising that Gay hypothesizes that "our delight grows as we share it".


All the pictures in this post are from California, 2001



Gay's delights can be engagingly self-deprecating. He explains, for example, how he deals with rising annoyance over the peccadilloes of others by picturing his "sad little annoyance monster, who, for the record, never smiles and always wears a crooked bow tie".

They can also have awful kickers: The culmination of the praying mantis story I found really hard to shake out of my memory... They can be bittersweet, like realizing that the pawnshop whose employee once drove him off the verandah it shared with the cafe next door has been taken over by that same cafe, and won't be driving anyone off any more.

They can be laugh-out-loud funny, like the tale of the airport security guy who mishears Gay's explanation that he is going to Syracuse to read poems, comments that he doesn't believe in that stuff himself, although he knows others do, and remarks to his colleague: "Hey, Mike, that guy's being flown to Syracuse to read palms!"

Or like the experience of carrying a tomato seedling through an airport and onto a plane, which occasions a blizzard of admiration and soft-hearted protectiveness from all those around: "Before boarding the final leg of my flight, one of the workers said, 'Nice tomato,' which I don't think was a come on. And the flight attendant asked about the tomato at least five times, not an exaggeration, every time calling it 'my tomato'."

Of course, Gay's tales also demonstrate that delight for one would be purgatory for another. He loves casual physical contact -- the high-five from a stranger, the tap on the arm from a flight attendant -- whereas many of us would shrink from this, far from delighted.

Overall, though, in their varied but powerful testimony to the alchemy wrought by the mixture of observation, curiosity, and warmth, they offer something profoundly life-enhancing.



Gay's choice of delights also encapsulates his philosophy. Some examples:

-- Inefficiency is not always a bad thing. And loitering can be a good thing, even if it means you are temporarily not consuming -- "a crime in America".

-- Delight does not make a good bedfellow with "ought" or "should", but it can pair itself with nostalgia, even existential loneliness.

-- Public statues should hold flowers or babies or tools or small animals, but "never again -- never ever -- guns".

-- Things that are "jenky" -- a word for the make-do, the bodged, the ramshackle substitute for a "proper" solution -- he extols as evidence of the innovative spirit occasioned by deprivation. He's not celebrating being broke. What he is spotlighting is the initiative, the smartness, the resilience that sparks successful improvisation. 

Perhaps the profoundest philosophical section is the one that discusses Zadie Smith's essay "Joy". Smith concludes that human existence is a riddle in which "the intolerable makes life worthwhile", and Gay goes on to develop what that might mean.

At least in part, it involves coming to terms with "a fundamental truth of our lives, which is simply that we die". He describes a dream where he is standing in line at the supermarket one day: "I had the stark and luminous and devastating realization ... that my life would end. I wept in line watching the cashier move items over the scanner, feeling such an absolute love for this life... It's a feeling I've had outside of dreams as well... It's a terrible feeling, but not bad -- terrible in the way that Rilke means when he tells us at the beginning of the Duino Elegies that 'All angels are terrible'... -- all angels remind us that annihilation is part of the program... Everyone... lives with some profound personal sorrow... Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness? Is sorrow the true wild? ... What if we joined our sorrows... I'm saying: What if that is joy?"

Gay is black, and sometimes the experiences he records sear you. Some examples:

-- "I'm trying to remember the last day I haven't been reminded of the inconceivable violence black people have endured in this country [the US]." 

-- "If you're black in this country you're presumed guilty... And the negreeting [the friendly acknowledgment of another black person], back home, where we are mostly never seen, is a way of witnessing each other's innocence -- a way of saying, 'I see your innocence.'"

-- The act of "loitering" that he so values is looked down upon because it is "an interruption of production and consumption. And it's probably for this reason that I have been among groups of nonwhite people laughing hard who have been shushed... The shushing, perhaps, reminds how threatening to the order are our bodies in nonproductive, nonconsumptive delight."

-- "One of the objectives of popular culture, popular media, is to make blackness appear to be inextricable from suffering, and suffering from blackness. Is to conflate blackness and suffering. Suffering and blackness.  Blackness and suffering...  And the delight? You have been reading a book of delights written by a black person. A book of black delight."

And finally, I love the way he skewers the elevator-door quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson ("The sun has not caught me in bed in fifty years"). Not only does it trample all over the delights and benefits of indolence, but it glides right over the fundamental inequities of his society: "This Jeffersonian sentence especially glows with stupidity, with cruelty, when you picture him at his desk, up before the sun in his parlor, drinking tea he did not make or pour, eating a crumpet he did not make or put on a plate, scratching this and other pithy statements with his quill dipped into a well he did not fill, because he owned six hundred people, most of whom were probably already at work."



All up, then, a unique and amazing little book. As Emily Ellison comments: "To read Gay is to feel adored by Gay. He encourages our wildest behaviors, our kindest behaviors, and sees the dancing in all we do..."